Opening her eyes to see rays of sunlight drifting across the sky, Erina scowled and sat up immediately.
"Gaara," she growled. The redhead looked down at her from the tree he was perched in, sending her a vaguely surprised look.
"Hmm... I suppose I forgot to wake you up for your watch," he said, glancing up at the sky. "Silly me."
While on other days Erina might have teased Gaara for using the word 'silly' in casual conversation, especially in regards to himself, she was not in the mood at the moment.
"You were supposed to wake me up!" she called up at him angrily. "Did you get any rest?"
"It was a slow night," Gaara shrugged. Erina took that to mean that he had meditated most of the time, but meditation wasn't always enough. The two had done a lot of work over the past few days, and had only been able to stay in one place for a few hours at a time, giving neither much time to rest or recuperate from the activity. "We should leave. A Konoha patrol came pretty close to us last night, but they skirted around us."
"Do you think they sensed us?" Erina asked. Gaara frowned lightly.
"I don't know. They had a Hyuuga with them, but he didn't alert his teammates to our presence, if he saw us. I think it's more likely that he didn't see us at all."
"We should leave," Erina echoed him with a nod. "We don't know how far away the next patrol will be and I don't want to be dragged into Konoha."
"They'd probably not torture you," Gaara said in what was probably meant to be a joking tone. "Or, at least, nothing permanent. Light scarring, perhaps."
"Whatever. Let's get out of here. And don't think you've gotten away with the whole watch thing. I'll get you back for that in Suna."
"What are you going to do? Knock me out and let Shukaku terrorize the village so I can get some shut-eye?" he asked, amused. Erina shook my head, a devious smile coming to her lips.
"Actually, I was just going to tell Temari."
"You wouldn't." Those seafoam green eyes narrowed at her dangerously. The redheaded girl shrugged.
"Wouldn't I?" she asked, finishing clean-up, careful not to leave a trace of their presence. Now done, Erina circled the tree Gaara was still sitting in slowly before grinning and running off towards home. "Last one to Suna has to give the mission report!"
"You play dirty," Erina scowled towards Gaara, dragging herself through Suna's gates three days after challenging Gaara back to Suna. It hadn't been her brightest idea to race the Ichibi jinchuuriki through an area comprised largely of desert sands, but she would pay for it as promised.
"I merely accepted your challenge," he responded coolly. Erina scoffed.
"Yes, I had expressly given my permission for you to throw a fucking sand dune at me to slow me down."
"You were drawing on the Kyuubi's chakra. Was I not allowed to use my own abilities?"
"You know that Kurama only gave me enough chakra to make me as fast as you, and even then you probably could have outrun me," Erina shot back. Gaara only shrugged lightly, gesturing towards the village with a hand.
The guards at the gate seemed increasingly uncomfortable as the exchange continued. Erina glared at one of them lightly.
"What's your problem? Never seen a couple of demon spawn having a conversation?" she snapped. The man paled dramatically and she smirked, rolling her eyes. "Jeez, relax. You'd think that Gaara-kun and I just came back from killing someone... Oh wait..."
"Never call me that again."
"Aw, is Erina-chan being mean to you?"
"Shut up."
"Genin Namikaze Erina and Sabaku no Gaara, reporting a successful mission," Erina said as clearly as she could to the chuunin at the Missions Desk. He glanced up at her with disdain and she wondered absently what he would do if she drew on just enough of Kurama's chakra to turn her eyes blood red and her teeth to fangs. He might even piss himself.
You want to? Kurama chuckled mischievously. No one gets away with insulting my flesh-bag. Except me, of course.
Aw, Kura-kun really does care, Erina said dryly to herself. The Kyuubi growled in warning.
"Report," the chuunin said, holding a brush to a blank mission report scroll. He'd put in the basic details and then give Erina the scroll to write the detailed report. It was such a bother.
"Mission rank B, type specialization assassination. The target was mobster Yakuzi Moto, trained formally as a genin of Yugakure and then dishonorably discharged due to importation of weapons, human slaves, and narcotics. Target was brought down successfully via asphyxiation by sand during his sleep, credited to Sabaku no Gaara."
The chuunin wrote out a few more lines on the scroll after she had finished speaking before rolling it up and handing it to Erina.
"Return the scroll to this office within one week to receive payment," he said, at least striving to be professional towards the two children. Erina accepted the scroll from him with a nod and turned towards the exit, Gaara following behind her silently.
Months passed and a pattern was struck up. Gaara would continue taking missions with his siblings but, as the Kazekage became more and more comfortable with Erina outside of the village, he was often pulled off for other missions. The two generally had a step-in jounin to lead their missions but, other than that, they were left unsupervised.
Training with the Kyuubi and the Ichibi was kicked up another notch in recognition of the new arrangement. The Sunagakure Council determined that they could become an unstoppable force if they wielded their demonic chakra as a tag team. It was difficult to mesh the two styles together but, as time passed, the two grew more attuned to each other and an interesting phenomena was discovered.
Erina was proven to be the one person able to calm Gaara out of a killing spree. Whether it was her own attitude or the presence of the Kyuubi chakra startling the Shukaku into submission, Erina was able to smack sense into the boy. While the first few dry runs were terrifying for the Kyuubi jinchuuriki, it was a useful ability to wield. It also had the added bonus of winning her points with the Suna populace.
Baby steps towards her goal of village wide respect. Baby steps.
Her other goal was almost within reach, especially with the next mission she and Gaara were assigned. It was poetic justice in a way; Konoha had given her up and kept her brother. Now that she was strong, she would fight him in the Chuunin Exams and destroy him, and then celebrate by tearing the village apart brick by brick.
Life was good.
"What will you do if you face Uzumaki Naruto during the course of the mission?" Gaara asked quietly. Erina glanced up at the boy with a raised eyebrow. He was perched in her window, one hand lazily manipulating balls of sand to spin, suspended in air.
"I'm offended that you have to ask."
"What will you do?" he repeated. The spheres of sand shifted into perfect cubes, sharp and exact as they danced around each other.
"Defeat him. Knock him out if possible, kill him if necessary. He may be my brother in blood, but he is no family of mine. You are more family to me than he."
Erina didn't understand what was so difficult to grasp that both the Kazekage and Gaara were directing this type of question at her. Konoha was not her home; Suna was. It was Suna, with its harsh climate and harsher people, that allowed her to become what she needed to be. The people of Suna may not have coddled her or anything along those lines, but what would have happened if they did? She would have been weak, spineless. A spineless kunoichi is a worthless one and Erina would slit her own throat before allowing her to be seen as worthless.
After much deliberation, it was decided that Gaara and Erina would be teamed together for the invasion of Konoha. They would be given a third team member, a chuunin young enough to pose as a genin, and the jounin commander would accompany them as their sensei to both keep and eye on the jinchuuriki and size up Konoha's forces and defenses.
Upon meeting their third teammate, Erina and Gaara immediately disliked him. The chuunin shifted between two moods: scared shitless and arrogant. The first time Erina had met him, just before they left Sunagakure to get to Konohagakure early enough to settle into the village and acquaint ourselves with its basic defenses, he was nearly shaking.
The boy- Erina didn't bother to learn his name, assuming that Gaara or she would probably tire of him enough to kill him as soon as they didn't need a teammate- was about sixteen years old to their twelve. He'd been promoted to chuunin in the field after a mission went horribly wrong and he, out of sheer dumb luck and some very poor decision making on the side of the opposition, ended up saving the lives of one of his teammates as well as his sensei. The fact that his other teammate died an agonizing and fiery death was apparently ignored. He was short for a guy, about 5'6", with stringy blond hair that always looked like it needed to be washed and the beginnings of a moustache.
As soon as it became apparent that neither Gaara nor Erina were going to kill him merely for existing, the boy took that to mean that they respected him as their superior and then proceeded to regale the two with tales of his victories over foreign shinobi as if they were his little kouhai. Erina was very doubtful of the tale involving how he single handedly crippled an Uchiha not two years ago, seeing as one of the Uchiha had gone insane and murdered everyone in his clan aside from his little brother. If What's-His-Name had met and defeated Uchiha Sasuke, the brat wouldn't have been an objective for Gaara and her to eliminate early on. If he had met Uchiha Itachi... Erina doubted that there would have been enough of him to put in a thimble.
Which would have been fine by her, as the boy kept going on and on about his self-inflated career.
"Can I kill him yet?" Gaara asked Erina lowly, coming closer to speak. She laughed, smirking towards the teenaged chuunin.
"I don't think we brought any extras. We'll be able to ditch him in Konoha, though."
"Can't we just ditch him now? It's not like the other teams will miss either of us," Gaara replied. She frowned but shook her head.
"If we leave the group, Baki-san or one of the other jounin will report us to the Kazekage. No... We can part ways once we get to the village."
"I'll hold you to that."
"Hey, did I tell you guys about that time I got in a fight with the Tsuchikage's granddaughter? I almost felt bad for beating her; she was pretty hot."
Erina resisted the urge to punch something, mainly What's-His-Name's face.
She was slightly comforted by the fact that, by the way that Gaara's hand twitched, he was entertaining the thought of crushing the chuunin to a bloody pulp with his sand.
If only...
